Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair by Susan Sheehan Read Free Book Online Page B

sexually abused by a Mr. Jones, the elderly superintendent of the last apartment Florence had in the Bronx before she was evicted for nonpayment of rent and moved in with her cousin Hazel. Mr. Jones knew that Crystal was confined to the house, taking care of her younger brothers, and that Florence beat up on her a lot, so Crystal would be grateful for a chance to get out. He told Florence that he had a sister in Harlem named Hattie who was in a wheelchair and that Crystal could clean her apartment on Sundays.
    â€œWhen I got there, I saw his sister wasn’t old and in a wheelchair—she was like any other old lady able to clean up her own house,” Crystal says. “He made me drink liquor, he made me smoke reefer, then he made me get in the bed with him and rubbed against me. He warned me about telling my mother. He said she wouldn’t believe me.”
    The second Sunday Crystal was taken to Harlem by Mr. Jones, she went to a store near Hattie’s building. Two young men, Floyd and Keith, were on the street. Crystal was a new face in the neighborhood. When they asked who she was and she told them she was there with her uncle, Mr. Jones, they knew that she was the latest little girl Mr. Jones had lured to Hattie’s apartment. “You got to stop sleeping in the bed with that old man,” Crystal remembers their saying. “After eating the hamburger and French fries they bought me, I did more drinking and smoked reefer with them. Then they took me to anabandoned apartment in Hattie’s building, only it was higher up. Floyd raped me while Keith watched. He then apologized, saying, ‘You looked so good I couldn’t help myself.’ He didn’t touch me again.”
    Floyd and Keith fed, housed, and clothed Crystal for almost two weeks, first at Floyd’s girlfriend’s house and afterward at a hotel. Crystal was content: she had no desire to return to her mother’s building to see Mr. Jones, to do more babysitting, to absorb more beatings. Mr. Jones told Florence that Crystal had gone to the store and never come back. Florence thought that someone had kidnapped Crystal. She had separated from Crystal’s father, Wesley Taylor, two years earlier, but he lived in the vicinity of Hattie’s apartment. She got in touch with him, and he went out looking for her. Floyd and Keith, who were a pair of robbers, got wind of the search and turned Crystal over to a police precinct in Harlem. She was questioned, and was examined by a doctor. Mr. Jones was brought into the precinct. He denied her accusations. She was driven home in a police car. “When I got there, Mr. Jones was outside the building,” she says. “He went downstairs to the basement apartment, where he lived with his wife. I went upstairs. My mother believed me in a way.”
    Crystal was thirteen when she met Daquan, on Findlay Avenue. On their first date, they went to the movies, had their pictures taken by a photographer outside the theatre, and went to a hotel elsewhere in the Bronx where Daquan paid for a so-called short-stay room, one they were entitled to occupy forthree hours. They both smoked dust. Crystal told Daquan she was hungry—she wasn’t eager to go to bed with him. He went out, and returned with “some nasty chicken.” While Daquan was taking off his clothes, Crystal saw forty dollars on the floor and pocketed it. “After we had sex and done all of that, I asked Daquan for some money to buy jeans with,” she recalls. “I really thought that money had been left in the hotel room by some previous person until Daquan asked me if I seen his money. I had the nerve to get down and pretend to help him look for it underneath the bed and the rug. When he realized he wasn’t going to find it, we left. I told him afterwards, when we was living together, ‘I robbed you. How do you think I got that extra pair of jeans?’ He told me he had a feeling I took the